Five Reasons The Networks Have No Business Covering Business (Or the Economy)

For
many Americans, ABC, NBC and CBS are the major source of news on
business and the economy. Unfortunately, this is like depending on the
middle school student newspaper for information about important local
school board deliberations.

Network
reporters are either ill-prepared to discuss complex issues of
economics, finance and business or choose to be advocates for viewpoints
rather than objective reporters who strive for balance. Liberal
preferences for government solutions and interventionism as well as
hostility toward wealth and profit dominate network coverage.

The
result was skewed, unfair and even inaccurate reporting on the economy
and the private sector. In 2012, network reporters got many economic
stories wrong. For example, they celebrated the radical aims of Occupy
Wall Street, linked weather events to global warming, and engaged in a
media campaign against safe beef and the company that sells it.

5. Journalists Still Side with Occupy

The
revolutionary movement known as Occupy Wall Street may have gotten
started in the fall of 2011, but they were still taunting police and
committing acts of violence in 2012, all while the media failed to
expose them.

In October 2011, MRC’s Business and Media Institute pointed out the networks’ unwillingness to use the terms “socialist” and “revolution”
in connection with OWS, even though protesters were marching with
Communist flags in some cities and others articulated their desire for
income inequality and for a new political system. Instead, the media
often gave favorable coverage to the occupiers.

NBC ignored Occupy Oakland protesters’ burning of a stolen American flag in January 2012. ABC’s Diane Sawyer fawned over “Occupy igloos”
in Switzerland built by people protesing the World Economic Forum
meeting. And as the OWS crowd tried to generate protests on May Day, ABC
labeled it a “traditional day of protest” that Occupiers could get “fired up about” rather than explaining the Communist roots of the protest day.

In
July, Occupiers taunted police in Oakland, Calif., with “art” drawings
of pigs and slogans like “kill the cops,” violence ensued. The morning
after that violence in Oakland, the network morning shows had little to
say. NBC’s four-hour long “Today” show skipped over the story
completely, while CBS “This Morning” and ABC's “Good Morning America” offered a combined 31 seconds.

This
kind of coverage of Occupy Wall Street wasn’t altogether a surprise,
since the journalists’ union also sided with OWS. The Communications
Workers of America (CWA) which represents journalists and other
communications workers, held a protest against Verizon, aka
“verigreedy.” In a video of the protest, CWA could be heard chanting “WE are the 99%” and holding signs that said “Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Verizon, Occupy Everything.” 4. Climate Coverage in 2012 Favors Hype and a Double Standard

On
CBS “Evening News” that night Wyatt Andrews specifically said “You’re
going to see a lot of scientists criticizing this as a guess ...” Yet,
there were no skeptics on the CBS report, or on ABC or NBC that night.
And all three stories ignored a new study published in Nature that showed a cooling trend.

In 2012, ABC also ignored Obama’s decision to not attend the UN’s Rio+20 environmental conference in June, even though 10 years earlier the network had criticized Bush
for not attending the same conference (Rio+10). The American media
ignored the issue of Obama’s non-attendance. None of the three major
networks mentioned the 2012 summit once.

However, 10 years earlier, when George W. Bush was president, the media slammed him for his refusal to attend the World Summit on Sustainable Development, popularly called Rio+10. ABC provided a platform to an environmental activist, who complained that the
U.S., Canada and Australia were “taking an isolationist approach to
this whole summit” without allowing any supporters of the president to
defend him.

Then
of course, there was Sandy. The networks quickly seized upon that huge
storm that devastated parts of New Jersey and New York trying to connect
the dots to climate change. CBS
“Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley read a brief item Nov. 14,
highlighting the view by "weather forecasters from the U.S. government"
that climate change "may have intensified" the storm. He didn’t mention any other viewpoints.

On
NBC, Anne Thompson announced, “This year alone, the nation's endured a
withering drought, the largest wildfires in history, and the warmest
month on record. In 2011, there were 14 extreme weather events, each
doing more than a billion dollars in damage. Now some politicians are
connecting the dots, blaming the gases that come from burning coal, oil
and gas for changing the climate.” She went on to quote Gov. Andrew
Cuomo, D-N.Y., who attributed Sandy to climate change.

Although
Thompson noted “scientists are more cautious,” she included a
meteorologist from the weather website Weather Underground who said “we
can’t say that Sandy was definitely caused by global warming, but we can
say it shifted the odds in its favor.”

If
anyone doubts the power a journalist can wield for ill, they only need
look to ABC’s Jim Avila. In 2012, Avila provided one hit piece after
another against Beef Products, Inc., a company that processes beef and
sells lean finely textured beef to supermarkets.

LFTB
is USDA-approved beef that people have been eating for two decades, but
that wasn’t good enough for Avila and ABC “World News.”

Avila
relied on former USDA employees who demonized LFTB as “pink slime” so
much that grocery stores including Safeway, SUPERVALU and Food Lion
stopped buying it. The negative label was repeated 52 times in just two-weeks
of ABC coverage. Beef Products, Inc., was forced to shut down three
plants and lay off nearly 700 workers. The company says the news
coverage cost them millions of dollars.

Two
examinations of the beef industry showed the devastating impact of the
fight over lean finely textured beef. According to an analysis by two
Iowa State University economics professors, that controversy cost at
least $573 million dollars.

The
American Meat Institute President J. Patrick Boyle put the blame for
those BPI job losses directly on ABC’s biased coverage writing, “Congratulations,
‘ABC World News.’ Your relentless coverage and uninformed criticism of a
safe and wholesome beef product has now delivered a hook for yet
another nightly news broadcast.”

In September, the company announced it was suing ABC News for $1.2 billion
because of “defamation, product and food disparagement, tortious
interference with business relationships, and other wrongs.” It’s
263-page complaint also charged the network with “nearly 200 false and
disparaging statements regarding BPI and its product, lean finely
textured beef.”

Based
on multiple readings of the lawsuit’s “painstaking explanation” of how
LFTB is made, Brill said, “I began to believe that it was Beef Products
that was slimed. I actually found myself believing that this may not be
‘The Jungle, Part Two’; that what the company produces really is the
‘lean, finely textured beef,’ or ‘LFTB’ that Beef Products’ complaint
says it is; that it is real meat, not “filler” or “gelatin,” as it was
described on ABC; and that it is safe and has been deemed so by federal
inspectors and officials who were not paid off or unduly influenced by
corporate politics and lobbying.”

The
country is hurtling toward the Jan. 1 deadline of automatic tax hikes
and spending cuts, if Congress and the president cannot make a deal to
stop it. Although each side has a different solution: liberals say
raise taxes, conservatives say cut spending, the overwhelming focus of
the network news has been on raising taxes. In fact, ABC’s “World News”
talked about raising taxes as the solution 17 times more than they’ve covered spending cuts.

ABC
devoted more than 10 minutes to talk of taxes and just 35 seconds to
spending cuts (10 minutes 18 seconds to 35 seconds) in the three weeks
following the presidential election and often harped on a pledge not to
raise taxes as the problem. ABC’s Senior Political Correspondent
Jonathan Karl pointed at the pledge as being a potential cause for the
fiscal cliff. “The pledge is the biggest obstacle to any deal that would
raise taxes,” he told “World News” viewers Nov. 26.

Combined,
the three network evening programs focused more than twice as much on
tax increases as they did on spending (29 minutes 31 seconds to 12
minutes 54 seconds) between Nov. 7 and Nov. 26.

It’s
interesting that spending cuts received so little coverage since even
President Obama admitted that entitlement spending is the top problem
causing deficits. NBC ran that comment during its “Nightly News” Nov.
25. “We have to continue to take a serious look at how we reform our
entitlements because health care costs continue to be the biggest driver
of our deficits,” Obama said.

BMI
also analyzed six months of coverage of the fiscal cliff ahead of the
presidential election and found that the networks portrayed the issue
inaccurately. They blamed Congress (and specifically Republicans in
Congress) 16 times more often than they blamed President Obama. Both
Congress and Obama should have been held responsible since the tax hikes
and spending cuts were the result of a deal made by both of them.

The
network news media often skew economic coverage in favor of liberal
candidates, and the way they covered the economy in 2012 was no
exception. Specifically in the month of September, during the thick of
the campaign cycle, coverage of the economy did not reflect how sluggish
the economy really was.

MRC’s Business and Media Institute analyzed coverage
of several economic indicators that month and compared coverage during
September 2004, when President George W. Bush was running for
re-election. BMI found that in spite of faster growth, a smaller deficit
and lower gas prices, Bush was blamed more than twice as often as Obama
for economic problems. “Record” high gas and oil prices were covered 3
times more in the 2004 period, than in 2012 -- in spite of prices that
had doubled.

Paul
Wiseman of the Associated Press wrote in September about the weakness
of Obama’s economic recovery, saying “Economic growth has never been
weaker in a postwar recovery.”

In
September 2012, journalists constantly predicted “relief is in sight
and soon” from high gas prices after prices were at record highs for
Labor Day. That was the opposite of how they had covered the issue under
Bush in the same month of 2004. They also attacked Bush for a $422
billion budget deficit, but when Obama’s 2012 budget deficit was $1.1
trillion, slightly less than three times the size of Bush’s deficit, the
media allowed him to criticize conservatives over debt and deficit
issues.

But September wasn’t the only month the networks did a poor job of covering the economy. In July, the networks were practically silent on a decline in gross domestic product (GDP) and they preferred to call President Obama’s plan to raise taxes on the rich a “tax cut”
plan. In June, when the May jobs report was a huge disappointment and
other media outlets covered the troubling matter of low labor force
participation, the networks barely mentioned the “hidden” jobless problem.

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